This week in Android apps: Facebook Home adds a dock and Gmail gets a new UI

The week has been riddled with app updates. Here is just a small portion of them.

It's Friday, it's nice outside in some places around the world, and the week has been chock full of Android updates from some of the most popular applications. We saw updates from major players including new features in Facebook Home, a new interface for Gmail, and the addition of Reminders for Evernote users. Falcon Pro also had a quick beta that started earlier this week and was eventually pushed through to the Google Play store. Let's go through these updates and see if they're worth downloading this weekend.

Back in May, Facebook said in a whiteboard session that it would soon push out a dock feature in an attempt to address concerns that Facebook Home took away some of Android's core features. This week, the social networking giant finally launched the update for the app, bringing with it a "favorites tray" that users can pin their most used applications to. The update did not include the addition of folders, however, which Facebook had alluded would be included in a future update of Home.

Facebook also updated its core application to allow insertion of multiple photos into a chat message, as well as the ability to immediately edit post sharing settings. The update for the favorites tray is slowly rolling out, which is why we were unable to provide a screenshot this time around, but you can update the Facebook app individually if you so choose.

Google launched a major interface update to Gmail this week, bringing with it the new compartmentalized inbox that Google had announced last week. A few have expressed disappointment with the new update, however, because of the exclusion of an explicit "delete" button. It's instead been replaced with the option to label messages as read or unread.

If you're one of the few fretting about the loss, fear not: within the Gmail settings there is an option to re-enable that delete button. Once you've selected the appropriate option, you'll see a little trash icon above each message.

The new Gmail also displays profile images alongside each message in addition to the colored label categories, though there's an option to turn that off, too. Overall. the update has improved readability for the app and fixed some bug issues, too.

The underdog Twitter client, Falcon Pro, now supports multiple user accounts and the ability to swipe between your feed, notifications, and direct messages. The added gesture functionality brings a much more intuitive feel to the application. Rather than having to swipe over to the menu screen to take you to a particular section, you can simply swipe directly underneath the columns indicator for one-handed Twitter-reading. Just remember that you'll have to manually select the functionality from the Settings menu before it will do so. This particular feature is available to those running Android 3.0 and above.

Falcon Pro also pushed through its own little interface makeover this week. It now sports a "flatter" design, as well as a new black theme.

The developer behind Falcon Pro was previously in the red for exceeding the Twitter token limit. The token count was eventually reset so that only active users were given a token. If you decide you don't like the app, do be sure to give up your token before uninstalling. You can do so by navigating to Twitter.com and selecting "Revoke Access" for Falcon Pro under the application settings menu.

Good news for those of you who have been using the popular note-taking suite as a task manager—now you can add Reminders to specific notes to pop up and remind you to get things done. You can create these tasks by selecting a due date and then setting up a notification within each individual note. When you've completed a task, select "done" to move on to the next.

Other updates to the application include the ability to subscribe to reminders in shared and business notebooks, improved copy and paste in note view, improved shortcuts, and note based to-do list that you can mark as you go along.

Bonus: Want the Jelly Bean keyboard? Download this app

If you're sick of your OEM keyboard and it's giving you a case of frustrated fingers, be sure to try out Google's Keyboard this weekend. The search giant released its stock Android keyboard in the Play store this week as a separate application. Android phones and tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich and above will be able to download and use the keyboard as a default. The app features gesture typing with a "floating" preview, in addition to voice typing, next-word suggestions and current-word completions, and advanced keyboard layouts. It also contains dictionaries for 26 different languages and it works on both smartphones and tablets.

If you've been using any third-party Jelly Bean keyboard knock-offs, you may want to consider switching over to the official one. As our own Andrew Cunningham put it earlier this week, "At least with Google's free first-party option, you'll be sending all of your data to a company that's already gathering it from your Android device anyway."

And though we didn't cover it earlier, don't forget that you can Vine this weekend to your heart's content. As always, if you have any suggestions for apps you'd like to see, leave a comment below.

Florence Ion
Florence was a former Reviews Editor at Ars, with a focus on Android, gadgets, and essential gear. She received a degree in journalism from San Francisco State University and lives in the Bay Area.